And the Holy Spirit said to me that’s just like you and me, Priscilla because I’m behind the scenes orchestrating and crafting the chapters of your story.
All the while you think I’m doing nothing, you point an accusatory finger at me wondering where I am and why I’m not hearing your request and why I’m not moving in the way that you would like me to move.
You’re assuming that I’m sitting back passively ignoring you where all the while I am busy making a story out of your life, the likes of which you can’t imagine.
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh my soul.
I will praise the Lord while I live, I will sing praises to my God.
While I have my being some trust in princes and some trust in mortal men and whom there is no salvation but not us.
Not tonight. We trust in the name of the Lord, our God.
How blessed is the one in whom the God of Jacob is their helper whose hope is in the Lord, his God, the one who made heaven and earth, the one who made the sea and all that is in them.
He’s the one who gives food to the hungry. He is the Lord that sets prisoners free.
He is the lord that opens the eyes of the blind. He raises up those who are down.
He is the Lord who loves the righteous. He’s the Lord that protects anybody that feels like a stranger.
He is the one that supports those that might be fatherless in the widow.
He thwarts the way of the wicked. The Lord will reign forever. He is our God. Oia.
Oh church to all generations. We ought to praise the Lord for it is good to sing, praises to our God.
It is pleasant to praise the Lord. He builds up his people. He gathers the outcast of Israel.
He heals the broken hearted, he binds up their wounds. He counts the numbers of the stars.
He gives all of them names.
That’s basically his way of saying if I can control the entire universe, I’ve got your life covered.
That’s what he said. Great. Is the Lord abundant.
Is his, is his strength sing to the Lord with thanksgiving sing praises to our God. Praise the Lord Jerusalem.
Praise him in the house tonight for he has strengthen your bars and your gates.
He has blessed your sons and your daughters. He brings peace to your borders.
He satisfies you with real good things. He makes sure his word runs very swiftly.
He scatters the frost like ashes who can stand before him because our God is good.
So praise the Lord, praise the Lord from the heavens, praise Him from the heights. Praise Him.
All you angels, praise Him, all you hosts.
Praise Him, sun and moon, praise Him highest heavens, praise Him waters that are above the heaven.
Let even those people praise the name of our great God. Praise the Lord.
Sing to the Lord, a new song. Praise him in the congregation. Let Israel be glad in her maker.
Let the Godly ones exalt and glory tonight. Praise the Lord.
Praise God in this sanctuary on Broadway in Times Square tonight.
Praise, praise him in the mighty expense.
Praise him for his excellent greatness. Praise him with the trumpet sound. Praise him with the harp and the liar.
Praise him with the timber and with the dancing. Praise him with the stink stringed instruments in the pipe.
Praise him with the loud symbols, praise him with the resounding symbols.
Let everything, the y’all are my people.
Y’all came to have church tonight is what you did take your seats if you can.
I want to tell you what a privilege that it is as Anthony has already said, for us to be here with you tonight to have an opportunity to lift up the name of Jesus because he’s worthy to be praised y’all.
Even with what you wrote down, what you need prayer for what’s hurting your heart, what’s ailing you?
What needs to be answered? Even with the miracle you require.
What you need to know is that your God is still good. He’s still sitting on the throne.
And the truth is even if he never did one more thing, I mean, seriously, if he never did another thing on our behalf, if he doesn’t answer this request exactly the way that you’re hoping he’ll answer this request.
The truth is he has already done enough.
But the great thing about our God is that He invites us to make our requests known.
He invites us to give to Him the desires of our hearts and then he invites us to trust Him with the answer.
So I’m so excited to pray with you tonight because we get the privilege tonight, not only to very specifically and boldly approach the throne of grace with every single request that has been written down.
And even those that are still tucked away in the quietness of your heart, even those of you that I know are on the other side of the screen, your request.
We want to cover those tonight.
But the great thing about our God is that not only can we present our requests, trusting Him, but at the end of every prayer, we can say, Lord, do this, do what I’ve asked or do something better because seriously the truth is He is the God of Ephesians 3 2021.
He is the one that does immeasurably more than you can ask and listen.
If you can’t ask it because you can’t, your brain can’t even come up with the right words to vocalize what it is you’re trying to ask for.
He says that’s all right. Just think it and I can do past that so we can boldly bring all of our request to the throne of God tonight.
Trusting that He is a great big God who still does great big things. I believe that God works miracles.
Anybody, I’m, I’m talking about flat, uh flat out jaw dropping straight up. Can’t explain it.
Miracle where you stand back and go. Oh no, you know, oh, that kind of stuff.
We’re going to pray about that tonight. I love that.
We have a God that allows us to do that in even this setting that any place is a sanctuary where God can meet us.
I love this unique opportunity that we have to be in this place where many a celebrity, many a talented person, many a gifted person has stood on this platform.
Many productions have taken place and in a place where people have been celebrated for their gifts and their talents on this kind of a platform.
I love it in this place today. There is only one celebrity and it’s nobody on the stage.
I love that. I love that. The celebrity is Jesus Christ man.
I can’t tell you how that takes the weight off us.
There’s just no pressure for us up here because we ain’t trying to impress you. How about that?
We’re going to have a good time tonight in the presence of the Lord.
My um I will tell you more about them later, but my three sons, you might see them sort of around and about.
We kind of all dive in together in ministry as Anthony said, he’s my younger brother and just in case you wondered everything he knows about music he learned from me anyway.
And um my husband is here as well.
We have three sons. They’re 14, 12 and eight. Jackson is our oldest. And then Jerry Junior and then Jude.
Jude is our surprise baby, Jude.
That’s why I named him Jude because that’s as close as I could get to revelation because it is finished.
That’s it. That’s the end of the line.
Jackson, Jerry Junior and Jude and Jude and I were sitting together on a airplane and he was seated over the wing, our seats were directly over the wing of the airplane.
And so he was sort of just looking out at the wing of the plane and there we were suspended in air flying to our destination.
And I could tell he was mesmerized by this whole concept that this tube of steel is in the air holding us up and that this, this wing is connected to the plane.
He was sort of just dissecting this entire, this entire situation.
And as he looked over the wing, he looked back at me and said, mom, how do they get that wing on this plane?
And I said, buddy, I gotta be honest with you. I have no idea.
I have no idea how they get that, that wing on the plane.
I don’t know how it works, but I have an idea for you, Jude, you have an uncle, their dad’s brother, Uncle Vaugh.
He works in the airline industry.
He actually works in the business where they, they make all the veins and the wiring that connects the different parts of the aircraft.
So I saw this as a teachable moment.
I said, you should talk to your Uncle Vaugh when we get home, it’d be a great opportunity for you to learn something.
And then I said to him, you know what you can be whatever you wanna be when you grow up, you do, you know that you can do whatever you wanna do.
Like if you wanna make airplanes like your Uncle Vaugh, when you grow up, you can so totally do that if you’d like to.
And as I said that to him, I said, buddy, you can be anything you wanna be in your life, anything you wanna do, you can do it.
He looked back at me and he said, mom, I don’t wanna do what Uncle Vaugh does when I grow up.
I wanna do what you do when I grow up.
You know, it’s one of those moments where you’re just thinking, baby, what do you want?
Whatever you want? I’m gonna give it to you.
Oh, but wait for it because I looked back at him and said, buddy, what does mama do now?
I had expectations about what his answer was going to be. At least some framework about how he might respond.
Lord, I’d love to or mom, I’d love to share the Lord with people. Mom. I’d like to write mom.
I would like to do a, a myriad of different things. Maybe that he could have said.
But he looked back and he said, he said, mom, I want to do nothing.
Just like you, you do nothing all day, every day, you do nothing.
I said, buddy, you see how like the clothes you’re wearing right now are clean.
How do you think that they actually get clean? He said, well, that’s just like washing. That’s no big deal.
I said, but you eat every day, you eat actual food. How do you think it gets cooked?
And he said that’s what moms do. That’s no big deal.
And I said, but you know, every now and then there’s a book or there might be a bible study.
There’s even, there was a little film, a little movie.
You remember it spent, we spent like three months making that, that what do you think I’m doing?
He’s like you just sitting behind the computer all day just doing this. You’re doing nothing.
I laughed.
And then I thought in that moment right after the conversation, how much that is like my relationship with the Lord.
In fact, there was confirmation of that because the very next day and I only share this with you to make this point.
But the very next day after that conversation with Jude, my publisher sent me an email, they sent an email to tell me about something that they know.
I never know because I’m keeping up with three sons.
They said, Priscilla, we just want to let you know that fervent, a little book that I had written.
We want you to know that it’s on the New York Times best seller list.
It actually won a few awards.
They said that to me in the email and all I could do when I looked at it was chuckle because it was just the day before that my son said to me that when I was doing to him to what looked like and amounted to nothing.
That is exactly when I was crafting something that hopefully would be a blessing to people’s lives.
And the Holy Spirit said to me that’s just like you and me, Priscilla because I’m behind the scenes orchestrating and crafting the chapters of your story all the while you think I’m doing nothing.
You point an accusatory finger at me wondering where I am and why I’m not hearing your request and why I’m not moving in the way that you would like me to move.
You’re assuming that I’m sitting back passively ignoring you where all the while I am busy making a story out of your life, the likes of which you can’t imagine.
I came to encourage somebody today that there’s a chapter that is being written right now with your story.
I’m talking about right now in that difficulty right now, in that valley year of your marriage right now, in that trouble in your finances, that difficulty on your job, that hardship with your coworker.
I’m talking about that one coworker.
The one that if she says one more thing to you, you go knock her out. That one.
There is a chapter. He is crafting a manuscript.
He’s writing that one day when we see him face to face, we’re going to see the story that he was telling.
And every single crown we get, we’re going to turn around and place it right back at his feet and say thank you Lord for this privilege that we had to live a life, a life in relationship with you.
And so even with these hardships and even with these hurts, we pray and we pray in gratitude, we pray in gratefulness in advance.
Thanking him for the answer that he will give us that is simultaneous to what we’ve asked for or the answer that is so far beyond our capacity to even comprehend and pray that we trust him for something that, that has so much generational ripple effect.
The likes of which we may never see in our grandchildren and our great grandchildren and our great, great grandchildren.
I’m so glad for the prayers of a grandmother and a great grandmother and grandfather in my life who prayed some himself that y’all, they didn’t get to see the fruit of their prayer.
But how glad I am that they trusted him to do what they were asking or something better.